Jack Shares on Saturday Nights

Starting tonight, Jack will be sharing his thoughts, knowledge, and stories about his short but already accomplished life training in Strongman. Listen, learn, and enjoy. Jack starts below:

Strongman and it’s Carry Over to Sport:

You might look at the word strongman and the first thought that comes to mind is what you see on T.V. where they are pulling planes up a hill. Incredible feat of strength but also incredibly intimidating when introducing strongman to an “average Joe.”. In the world of strongman the end goal is usually moving an object from point A to point B as fast as able, or lifting an object as many times as able within a certain time domain (usually one minute) or a max lift/carry.

Max effort training is crucial in training, sport, and even life. A reason people say they don’t like maxing out has to do with injury and fear. I hate to say it, however, but that is the dumbest thing in the world. Or maybe not THE dumbest, but close. You’re telling me that if a psycho, may or may not be named Jack, is chasing you with a baseball bat, you’re going to run away at a 75% pace? Hell freaking no! You are going to run away as fast as you can, aka MAX OUT RUN.

“oh excuse me sir, I’m kind of worried about straining a hammy, so if you don’t mind not chasing me with a baseball bat…”

My point here is there is nothing to be afraid of with maxing out, or it is a fear that is something we need to just get over. Truth be told you can get hurt maxing out, you can get hurt doing sets of 10, you can get hurt walking into the gym. However if you have great coaching and are lead the correct way to your max out, you wont get hurt you will just get better. We have great coaches, so no need for fear. Maxing out, the basis of Strongman, creates such a stimulus for your body that it forces you to adapt, to the change and make you stronger.

Any who, let’s take weightlifting for example as sport carry over. We always cue, “Get tall!” or “Finish!”. The thing with only training with barbells is you can still make non max lifts without perfect technique. Max efforts, like much of Strongman, not so much.

Take loading a stone to a 50-inch platform. If you don’t ‘get tall’, you aren’t loading that stone anytime soon. The feedback loop with any Strongman implement is so immediate, that the slightest flaw in your technique will be exposed and result in a failed attempt. These movements, such as loading a stone, are so important because it is a very easy tool to correct movement pattern, therefore crosses over to lifting as you hopefully see. The skill level is incredibly low to lift a stone, or carry a yoke, or push a sled, but the results are astounding because it forces you to strain and complete the lift with proper mechanics.

I can teach anyone to load a stone in one class. We all know how long it takes to learn how to max out a snatch with any meaningful response. This is why Strongman can be a great precursor to improving your lifting, while also helping improve your fitness. The same explosiveness occurs in both the stone load and snatches, cleans and jerks.

Bottom line, don’t limit yourself to just one way of practicing, because just doing snatches all the time will not make you better at snatches, your body is a fine tuned machine and it will just get used to what you are doing. It’s the same reason CrossFit is so helpful and popular, that we need something different to keep the body guessing, and now we have a way to do this to the millionth degree.